Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

First published: 1981

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: The Caribbean, New York City, and Florida

Principal Characters:

• William “Son” Green, an uneducated African American man
• Jadine “Jade” Childs, a well-educated African American model
• Valerian Street, a retired white businessman
• Margaret Street, Valerian’s wife
• Sydney Childs, Jade’s uncle, the Streets’ butler
• Ondine Childs, Jade’s aunt, the Streets’ cook

The Novel

The tar baby in Morrison’s title is Jade, an intelligent black woman, orphaned and Paris-educated, who at twenty-five stands poised between two worlds. The world into which she was born is that of her aunt and uncle, Sydney and Ondine Childs, servants to the affluent Streets. Impressed by Jade’s unique abilities, the Streets have provided the wherewithal for her to study art history at the Sorbonne. Jade functions socially both in the world of the Streets and the world of the Childses. Tar Baby, a polemical novel, projects Jade’s two worlds effectively. Although legitimately a member of each world, Jade sometimes wishes that race were not a part of her social context. She wants to be accepted for the person she is inside. Much of the book is—on the surface, at least—concerned with Jade’s attempts to establish her identity.

Isle des Chevaliers, the Caribbean island on which most of the novel is set, is a mystical place named for a shipload of legendary blacks who were struck blind at their first sight of the island. They were not sold into slavery, as had originally been intended, but were left to wander the island, as their descendants still do. The setting is idyllic yet ominous; spirits lurk in the deep jungle foliage.

Valerian Street and his wife, Margaret, a former beauty queen two decades his junior, came to the island from Philadelphia. Valerian has retired from his lucrative candy manufacturing business. Their faithful servants, Sydney and Ondine Childs, accompanied them to Isle des Chevaliers, Sydney as butler, Ondine as cook. The two, however, are not enthralled at being separated from their roots. Sydney dreams often of his native Baltimore. The Childses are exemplary servants. Their relationship is warm and touching.

Into this harmonious setting comes Son, the protagonist, a street-savvy black who has fled the United States after murdering a woman. Son, homesick and disheartened, sneaks off his ship shortly before Christmas and is borne by the currents to Isle des Chevaliers. He steals food from the Streets’ kitchen. When Son is caught, Valerian, rather than having him arrested, invites Son to eat at his table, where Jade and Son interact uncertainly. Son is not Jade’s kind of black. To begin with, his skin is much darker than hers. He is unschooled. He believes that whites and blacks can work together, but—reflecting attitudes Morrison’s own father possessed—he clearly thinks that blacks and whites should not eat, live, or sleep together.

Son and Jade become antagonistic to each other. Each obviously sees in the other something magnetically attractive yet inherently threatening. Their mutual attraction, however, prevails, and soon the two are openly enamored of each other. Jade perceives her primitive roots in Son—what Morrison elsewhere calls the “true and ancient properties” of her race. Jade is to Son the fulfillment of his dreams, the tar baby that attracts him hypnotically but that can trap and destroy him utterly.

Shortly after Christmas, Son and Jade go to New York, where they cohabit for several months. They then journey to Florida, where Son was reared. During this trip, Jade realizes that she cannot be Son’s “woman” in the dominating way he demands. Son knows he cannot accommodate Jade’s way of life, where color lines are muted, where black and white commingle on equal terms.

Son pursues Jade when she returns to Isle des Chevaliers. In the novel’s epilogue, however, Son is on the far side of the island, stumbling in the overgrown foliage, seeking the blind horsemen, the distant progeny of the original black settlers, who will help him renew his roots and escape the charms of the tar baby who has nearly robbed him of his manhood and ethnicity. In the end, Valerian Street’s way of life is eroded when he learns that his wife has abused their child, a secret Ondine has kept from Valerian and Sydney for many years. Sydney and Ondine essentially take control of l’Arbe de la Croix, Valerian’s ironically named, idyllic estate, upon which the unrelenting tropical jungle encroaches steadily.

The Characters

Valerian Street, a good businessman who grew rich in the competitive world of manufacturing, married Margaret, recently crowned Miss Maine, when he was in his mid-thirties. Margaret was more a trophy than a wife. Valerian, more liberal and sensitive than the stereotypical cigar-chomping American businessman, accepts his servants’ orphaned niece as a surrogate daughter. Valerian, however, does not realize that some blacks toward whom he directs his liberalism—notably Son and Sydney—do not share his egalitarian views of race and class. In the end, Sydney is more the master of l’Arbe de la Croix than Valerian can be; Son, having made his statement, flees the socially disordered household he has disrupted.

Margaret Street married too young. Her youth and beauty attracted Valerian and her major effort now is to preserve the fast-fading youth and beauty that first made her attractive to him. It is a losing battle. Margaret is terrified of Son, probably because he represents a smoldering, primitive sexual force that simultaneously attracts and repels her. Margaret apparently has no society outside her life with Valerian. She tried early in their marriage to establish a social equality, a camaraderie, between herself and Ondine, but Valerian discouraged it.

Sydney Childs has pride and dignity. He loves his wife deeply and touchingly. He massages her throbbing feet, but refuses to wear slippers when his bunions ache because he considers himself a first-rate butler who cannot be first-rate in slippers. Sydney is reminiscent of the title character in James Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1902), the resourceful, highly competent butler, capable of taking over but—understanding class distinctions—willing to only when dire necessity makes it unavoidable.

Ondine Childs demonstrates the special bond that exists among women. She is Margaret’s confidante, a role in which she proves herself completely trustworthy. She has not shared Margaret’s darkest secret with anyone, including her husband. Ondine is the quintessential black matriarch. She and Sydney are, in essence, more capable of running l’Arbe de la Croix than the Streets are. Race, class, and gender are the major factors that keep Ondine in the kitchen for most of her life rather than in the drawing room, where, given Jade’s opportunities, she might have landed. Ondine, like her husband, has inherent dignity and native intelligence.

Jadine Childs exemplifies the new black. Well-educated, refined, intelligent, upwardly mobile, the twenty-five-year-old Jade holds the world in the palm of her hand. She wants to overcome her blackness not because she is ashamed of it but because she believes that race is not a relevant factor in determining the worth of people. Her own accomplishments bespeak her contention. Jade, nevertheless, is drawn to the unschooled, primitive Son, who represents the pulsating call of the ancestral past. Morrison’s father might well have been the inspiration for Son’s father. In racial matters, Son thinks the way Morrison’s father thought. He distrusts whites and believes in the separation of the races. Son’s attraction to Jade is perhaps based psychologically upon his desire to tame her, to return her to her racial roots. Jade attracts Son physically, but more as an object to be controlled and tamed than as someone with whom to share his life.

Two minor characters are also significant: Gideon, the yardman, and Thérèsa, the partially blind maid, both of whom function as a sort of chorus. Although free, they are treated like chattel—ostensibly free, but slaves nevertheless.

Critical Context

Reared in Ohio, Toni Morrison was in her thirties when the race riots of the 1960’s raged. By then, she held a bachelor’s degree in English from Howard University and a master’s degree from Cornell University, had taught at two universities, had married, had borne two sons, and had been divorced. By the end of the 1960’s, she had taken a position as an editor at Random House. The events of the 1960’s affected her deeply, even though she was not an activist.

Nevertheless, the social changes of the time had implications for all African Americans, causing Morrison to think hard about what it means to grow up black in America. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is about a young black girl who longs to have blue eyes. Morrison’s Sula (1973) and Song of Solomon (1977) explore some of the social problems Morrison pinpoints so sharply in Tar Baby. Along with obvious matters of racial prejudice and stereotypes, Morrison’s novels are concerned with black women’s roles in male-dominated societies. Her works also focus on the social and economic questions of the poor in a society that is clearly affluent—one that is, paradoxically, equal yet glaringly unequal.

The social context of Tar Baby is enhanced by Morrison’s choice of setting. Isle des Chevaliers is at once romantic and decadent, appealing and appalling, comfortable and terrifying, foreign and familiar. Despite its distance from the United States, this Caribbean island provides a microcosm that obviously represents the United States and that presents—often in exaggerated form—the most pressing social problems of Morrison’s homeland.

Jade, in broad ways an autobiographical character, suggests many correspondences to Morrison’s own life and to the adjustments she had to make as a member of a racial minority during a time of racial transition. Jade is, at least partially, on the road to becoming what Morrison became in society: a black woman, bright and educated, who could function well in the white world. Both have shaken loose their bonds of blackness in a segregated society and, by virtue of sheer intelligence and talent, have flourished in the broader social context. The inner conflicts that Jade experiences are conflicts with which Morrison had first-hand familiarity.

Bibliography

Lange, Bonnie Shipman. “Toni Morrison’s Rainbow Code.” Critique 24 (Spring, 1983): 173-181. Discusses Morrison’s use of color in her first four novels, arguing that her color imagery works consistently throughout the novels. Of particular importance to Tar Baby are the discussions of red, green, yellow, silver, and gold.

Lepow, Lauren. “Paradise Lost and Found: Dualism and Edenic Myth in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. ” Contemporary Literature 28 (Fall, 1987): 363-377. Argues that one of the primary themes of Tar Baby is the unfulfilling, destructive nature of dualistic or binary thinking. As a result, unlike many other critics, Lepow views the ending of the novel as positive for Jadine, who flies out on her own.

Mobley, Marilyn E. “Narrative Dilemma: Jadine as Cultural Orphan in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. ” Southern Review 23 (Autumn, 1987): 761-770. Argues that with Tar Baby, Morrison attempts to realize two conflicting goals: to affirm the autonomy of the self and to emphasize the importance of one’s heritage.

O’Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Compares the representation of motherhood in Tar Baby to that in Morrison’s other novels; argues that Morrison’s treatment of the domestic, familial sphere has political effects.

Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. “Folklore as Matrix for Cultural Affirmation in Tar Baby. ” In Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Discusses Morrison’s use of folklore and myth to describe and portray the theme of finding one’s identity or true self.